Eating, Drinking and Recreating Street Food From Around the World

A Little Bit of China in Flushing

When I moved back from China in 2003, I had forgotten how to communicate in English (I couldn’t really speak in Chinese either) and I craved Chinese street food. I spent hours on the internet tracking down recipes, testing the authenticity of cookbooks I discovered, and traipsing from Brighton Beach to Manhattan and Queens and back again to indulge in the flavors I missed. I had some hits and misses (one miss involving a very hungover friend and a 45 minute subway ride on the Q train and some dismal food) and some delicious rewards. And while these experiments were fun, I would have killed for this brilliant interactive map and feature in today’s NY Times about the Chinese food in Flushing.

Chinese street food is clearly a popular topic for a newspaper feature as the Olympics are around the corner and hundreds of previously uninitiated tourists are about to taste Chinese street food for the first time. The Star wrote a Beijing Street Food Top 10 List. While I don’t think a list of ten can do Chinese street food justice, this list does show the brilliant breadth of Beijing street foods and its origins from Xinjiang to Wuhan.